Junior College Rarely Leads to Private University

Remarkably few community college students transfer to prestigious private schools despite being highly qualified, according to a new study.

Less than 1% of incoming students at the nation’s private elite four-year schools transferred from community colleges in 2002, the study found.

By contrast, nearly 80% of community college students transferred to what the study called “nonselective” four-year schools between 1992 and 2000.

Though the study, released Monday, did not include statistics by state, race or ethnicity, researchers said the findings suggest a discouraging trend for minorities and low-income students, since they represent a majority of community college students nationwide.

Other studies show that community college students in California didn’t fare much better than students nationwide, said Estela Mara Bensimon, a USC professor and one of the study’s researchers. She added that the majority of those likely to transfer in California were from white or Asian American families with middle incomes or higher. They also tended to have better access to information about colleges.

Bensimon cited an internal study of one community college in California to demonstrate the challenges facing would-be transfer students. Students were tracked from 1999 to 2002. Of the 10,479 freshmen who indicated an interest in transferring to the University of California or California State University systems, 109 did.

In the study released Monday, researchers weren’t sure why the transfer rates to elite schools were so low but suspected increasing competition among private schools for freshman classes and low attrition rates.

Joshua Wyner, vice president of the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation in Lansdowne, Va., which co-funded the study, said private universities need to recruit more from this diverse and talented pool of candidates.

“They want more low-income students and more underrepresented minorities,” he said, “but they continue to look in the same place: America’s high schools.”

Researchers examined data over 20 years and used ratings from Barron’s Profiles of American Colleges and other sources to determine the top 180 private colleges for certain findings.

The yearlong study was done by researchers from the University of Massachusetts Boston and the University of Southern California.